The back office

Admin Control Panel: eCommerce Guide

Your back-office system is the engine room of your online retail store. It performs all the behind-the-scenes functions that the website visitor cannot see.

By and large, when people refer to the back office they mean the Administrator control panel that allows you to perform the day-to-day tasks involved in running your eCommerce site, such as creating and managing promotions, monitoring the status of orders and maintaining your product catalogue.

However, the back-office system also comprises the automated processes that your system code performs invisibly in the background.

These include:

  • Updating information – such as details in your product catalogue and customer database
  • Powering your shop-front search system – by generating lists of products that match customer search queries
  • Sending out order confirmation emails
  • Exchanging payment instructions with a secure payment gateway
  • Processing and formatting information for exchange with any external systems, such as accounting software or stock control

What you should look for


Your back-office system does a lot of work, so it is important that you choose an eCommerce web design solution that is efficient, robust and easy to use.

A badly organised and unreliable back-office system will impact on the overall efficiency of your eCommerce operation, which can also have a knock-on effect on the quality of customer service you provide.

Therefore back-office software should be thoroughly tried and tested as coding problems can lead to error messages that may undermine confidence in your eCommerce operation, slow-running code or even loss of trading due to system downtime.

The more your back-office system is able to automate all the processes involved in running your online store and the more it is tailored directly to your own business needs then the more efficient and successful your eCommerce solution will be.

What’s more, an online retail business, in particular, can grow very quickly. So not only should you think about what an eCommerce solution can do now, but also what it can do in the future.

This means checking that your choice of eCommerce system is scalable, so that in the future you can add new features or integrate the back office with other computer applications that you use to run your business.

And this is where choosing a comprehensive eCommerce web design service can really pay dividends.

Instead of an off-the-shelf one-size-fits-all system you’ll get a made-to-measure streamlined solution that can be adapted to your changing needs as your business expands and evolves.

What you need to consider


The proof’s in the pudding. Read more about how Rapid Web Services has helped clients to build flourishing online businesses.

View case studies

Rapid Web Services developed its back-office administration platform using a modular system format, allowing you the flexibility to add your own custom features quickly and cost-effectively as and when you need them.